The Wreckage of Lordaeron
by Aranya Ver'Sarn
Summary: Emotions run high in Arcanist Aranya Ver'Sarn as she looks out over the wreckage of Lordaeron with her betrothed, Captain Halenvar Bloodborne. Timeframe: A day or two after the Battle for Lordaeron.


The desolation spread as far as any eye could see, or as far as anyone could see with the thick haze of blight gas and smoke swallowing every horizon. Brill was razed, no citizen and no building spared by the Alliance. Lordaeron Keep itself was awash with glowing green toxic mist that refused to lift, the whole city above and below now uninhabitable to both living and undead alike. Between here and there, the broken, smoldering remains of siege towers, glaive throwers, shredders and demolishers, and other machines of war littered the landscape with the myriad bodies of the fallen.

Aranya had taken it all in before alighting on what was left of one of the zeppelin towers with her betrothed, Captain Halenver Bloodborne. It was so quiet now. Resoundingly quiet against the noise that stormed in her head for the last week.

"This…" nearly choked Aranya, standing next to Halenvar, staring at all the wreckage. "I have watched this kingdom change, for better and worse, as long as I've lived… I never could have imagined this in a thousand years."

"This is the price we pay," said Halenvar, his voice and his permanently glowering face like stone. "This is what we paid for."

Aranya's head snapped to look her lover in the face, warring emotions all over her expression, her tense posture. "I LEFT the Horde for less than this! When Hellscream was Warchief!" The arcanist all but yelled. She had exiled herself many years ago, for a time, unable to stay with the course she saw the Horde going. But even in the paradise and relative peace that she had found, the arm of Hellscream still found her. Once his bounty on her reached the Razaani ethereals, they had kept her imprisoned in one of their stasis spheres for many months before she escaped.

"What do I do now with this?!" Aranya's voice got even louder, more distraught. "Run back to Shattrath, to Valéria?" Oh, how she would have loved for her only care in the world to simply be brushing her daughter's hair again. "Pretend I don't know that idyll never lasts?"

Running wouldn't work this time. Not that it had worked the fist time. With Garrosh as warchief, she'd had a year, maybe two. But with Sylvanas Windrunner as warchief, no one - not even Arcanist Aranya Ver'Sarn - would last out even a week.

There was no running from this.

"How do I FACE it this time?" Aranya yelled, despairing, angry, frantic for some fragment of hope.

Halenvar's face carried no emotion as he looked out across the Blight, its sickening green glow contrasting sharply against the fiery red shine of his hair. "This is war," he said "This is the real horror of war."

Aranya regarded him, almost open-mouthed. _"Real_ horror?" She echoed. As if _she_ of all people needed to be told what the horror of war was, after all that she had lived and fought through even before she met the captain. "It was horror enough when the Scourge sacked our kingdom," she shot back, but her tone softened with a mournful note as her smoldering green eyes turned back to the wreckage of Lordaeron. "How much more of a horror is it when the one who leads you says they must destroy you to save you?"

Aranya shook her head, trying to process it all. Her troubled mind and spirit were finding no comfort about the situation in what few words Halenvar had spoken - which was unsettling and rare in and of itself - yet on instinct, she still reached for his hand, his physical presence, desperate for some form of comfort at all.

"We all do as we have too," said Halenvar, his voice no longer like stone but sounding strong, with a note of gentleness underneath it for her ears only as he took her hand, but continued to stare at the Blight.

They stood in silence together like that awhile, but at length, the captain spoke again. "We must return to Silvermoon," he said. "The Alliance will be coming there next."

Aranya nodded, her spirit already preparing for another fight as soon as he spoke those words. "They'll want to put pressure on our people," she agreed. "I know many in the Alliance think we can be swayed to them." It was common talk in Stormwind, the idea of whether or not King Anduin could finish what his father started and Jaina Proudmoore had sabotaged, negotiating the kingdom of Quel'thalas back into the Alliance. "But at this point they may try it with force."

The sorceress conjured a portal, and after the warrior had stepped through, she followed.


End file.
